AUDITORY VERBAL SESSIONS
• The A-V sessions usually cover the four areas of audition, language, speech, and cognition and may last from 1 hr. to 1-1/2 hours. Many activities overlap into one.
• Parents always participate and significant others also encourage.
• Modeling and reinforcement.
• Transfer the teaching of an activity to the parent in the session.
• Many objects, toys, real objects.
• Many suggestions are given to increase opportunities for language stimulation.

DEVELOPMENT OF AUDITORY SKILLS
Levels of auditory skills
• Developed at 4 levels: detection, discrimination, identification and comprehension.
• The goal is to progress from detection to comprehension ASAP.
• The dev of auditory skills divided into: phoneme identification in syllables, word id in phrases, auditory memory (Simser, 1993).
• Acoustic highlighting is used: repetition, changes in rate of speech, pitch and rhythm.

CREATING A LISTENING ENVIRONMENT
• Being close to the mic.
• Sitting beside a child and focusing on objects placed in front of parent and child.
• Minimize background noise.
• Use spoken language e rich in suprasegmental qualities, repetitive, low and mid frequency vowel content, short meaningful 2 to 3 word phrases.
• Cueing a child to listen.
• Following a child’s interest level in age and stage appropriate activities with specific targets integrated.
• The child WILL learn to listen. NB: expectation.
DEVELOPMENT OF SPOKEN LANGUAGE
• Language and cognition are built together, using expanding cognitive skills to further develop language.
• A-V therapy: language should be learned using the principles of whole language:
1. Follow a natural course of development.
2. Recognize that language is part of overall development.
3. Language exists primarily for communication.
4. Language is best learned through communication.
5. Help child to search actively for meaning in utterances.
6. Help child to learn spoken language by encouraging them to use it.
7. Make spoken language part of all activities.
8. Base reading and writing on spoken language and not vice versa.
9. Promote language in the course of everyday living.
10. Don’t present language in unnaturally limited forms (ling, 1986).

HOW PARENTS CAN TEACH LANGUAGE AT HOME
• Talk clearly at normal conversation al level and at close range.
• Talk about everyday routine situations.
• Talk about objectives and events that relate to share experiences.
• Look for the best possible level of comprehension, even from the earliest stages.
• Provides abundant context to endow utterances with meaning.
• Use intonation in order to mark semantic boundaries.
• Use hearing, frequency to the exclusion of lip-reading, rather than always divert gaze to them.
• Talk in complete sentences.
• Follow their child’s focus of attention.
• Allow sufficient time for their child to respond.
• Precede body language with speech.
• Shift responsibility for speech intelligibility to the child as he/she grow.
• Accept that they have the primary responsibility for the child’s communicative competence (ling, 1986).
SPEECH SKILLS
When help is called for, the following techniques can be used:
• Teach speech in short bursts only and immediately put the new sound into meaningful language.
• Employ any perceptual sense necessary (e.g. vision or kinaesthetic) – put it straight back into listening and rehearse it.
• Try for the speech pattern by listening alone at next attempt.
• Utilize a combo of the natural development sequence for speech plus Daniel Lings recommendations for speech remediation.
• Vary approach according to the child’s spontaneous speech development. If the target sound occurs spontaneously in speech, reinforce it and move on.
• Use music and singing to assist voice pitch and rhythm, to enhance control of intonation, and to develop breath flow and breathe control.